How the Shooting in Dallas Turned a College Into a Crime Scene

When shots rang out inside El Centro College’s downtown Dallas campus shortly after 9 p.m. on Thursday, the 58 students and employees working there late had no way of knowing just how close the gunman was.

It wasn’t until 9:36 p.m. that students said they had received their first alert from the college warning them to take cover.

By then some of them had, in their confusion and panic, taken the elevator downstairs, narrowly missing Micah Xavier Johnson as he shot his way into the building, wounding two college police officers.

They were among the nine city and campus officers injured and five Dallas police officers killed during the rampage that played out as terrified students and employees hunkered down in different locations on and near the campus.

Eight people crammed into a janitor’s closet on the first floor of the C Building, directly below where the gunman had barricaded himself.

Others were evacuated to a privately owned parking garage across the street, where news accounts throughout the night mistakenly said the gunman had been cornered.

In an interview with CNN on Sunday, Dallas’s police chief, David O. Brown, confirmed that the gunman had been killed on the second floor of El Centro’s C Building.

“The crime scene was at El Centro,” the college’s president, José Adames, told reporters on Monday. “It is the epicenter of all of this that occurred.”

El Centro, one of seven colleges that make up the Dallas County Community College District, has closed its main campus downtown until at least early next week. Summer classes that began on Tuesday are starting out online. Meanwhile, the police are combing through the clues that were left behind, including shattered glass and shell casings. Mr. Johnson, a 25-year-old black Army veteran who felt animosity toward white police officers, had used his own blood to smear the letters “RB” on the campus walls, though it’s not clear what those letters meant.

Interviews with students and briefings from campus and city officials reveal a clearer timeline of what happened after Mr. Johnson burst into the A Building, where the nearly five dozen students, faculty, and staff members were, mostly on the seventh and eighth floors.

Campus police officers had locked the building as a routine precaution at 8 p.m. when hundreds of people protesting fatal police shootings in Louisiana and Minnesota started marching toward the campus.

Karla Fierro, a junior studying criminology and criminal justice at the University of Texas at Arlington, was one of about a half dozen students taking a statistics final in that building when the silence was shattered by shouts and gunfire around 9 p.m. “We heard people outside chanting and then gunshots, but we had no idea what was going on, and we had no idea we were on lockdown,” Ms. Fierro said.

After looking out the window and seeing officers waving flashlights, she and a few classmates ventured downstairs in the elevator while the others stayed behind. When the elevator doors opened, armed officers shouted at them to put their hands up. The floors were littered with broken glass and blood where, just minutes earlier, the gunman had shot his way into the building.

A campus police detective, Cpl. Bryan Shaw, was hit by a bullet under his vest as he guarded the entrance. Another campus officer, John Abbott, was hit by flying glass, suffering injuries to his legs. Both continued helping injured officers and protecting civilians as the gunman raced upstairs through the B Building, then across to C.

The officers didn’t fire on him because they didn’t have a clear line of sight, the community-college district’s police chief, Joseph R. Hannigan, told reporters.

Dallas and campus police officers ushered the students outside and yelled above the din of helicopters and sirens, telling them to stand against a wall.

At 9:36 p.m., about 40 minutes after the shooting had started just outside their building, Ms. Fierro received the following mobile alert from the community-college district:

Too late to shelter in place, the students followed as police officers hurried the group, which had grown to about 14, across the street to a parking garage owned by Bank of America, where they moved from a first-floor stairwell to the basement.

“For a split second, I was afraid for my life,” Ms. Fierro said. “Even the police were confused about how many men were shooting and where they were.” The police, she said, “were with us the whole time. All they cared about was keeping us safe.”

Shortly after midnight, she said, the police officers pointed them in the direction of the Omni Dallas Hotel, where they took off running.

College officials did not respond to requests for details about how the other students and employees had been evacuated, saying only that those on lockdown in the main campus building “were escorted to Dallas Police Headquarters after midnight.”

Meanwhile, negotiations with the gunman, who was holed up on the second floor of El Centro’s C Building, were going nowhere.

Just before 3 a.m., the police used a robot to detonate a bomb that killed him. The students, by now safely evacuated, didn’t hear the explosion, Ms. Fierro said.

Jose Morales, who was taking the statistics final with Ms. Fierro, is troubled by how close he came to running straight into the gunman.

“If we’d gone downstairs 10 minutes earlier, we would have met him face-to-face,” said Mr. Morales, a junior at the district’s Eastfield College.

By the time he received the shelter-in-place alert, it was buried in a flurry of messages from worried friends and relatives as he stood outside the campus. “It was way too late,” he said.

Ms. Fierro doesn’t fault the college. “Who would have guessed that he’d break into the building?” she said. “I’m pretty sure they did it as fast as they could.”

El Centro officials did not respond to questions about the timing of the alert.

Law Enforcement and Academe

A series of deadly police shootings of black men has plunged law-enforcement agencies around the country into controversy. This collection of Chronicle articles offers insights on campus and local police departments and the scrutiny they face.

• U. of Cincinnati Grapples With the Legacy of a Black Man Killed by Its Police
• ‘One Trigger Finger for Whites and Another for Blacks': What the Research Says
• How Bias Training Works in One Campus Police Department

As officials sift through eyewitness accounts, body-camera pictures, and video footage from nearby businesses to piece together what happened, they won’t get much help from the college’s security cameras.

Those cameras “went down when the college website crashed, overloaded by the volume of hits the website received,” a college-district spokeswoman, Ann Hatch, wrote in an email. Campus officials did not respond to questions about how that could happen.

The president of the International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators said that while he wasn’t familiar with El Centro’s cameras, he believed that some internet-based systems could go down if a college’s network crashed.

“There are hundreds of configurations from campus to campus, some much more robust than others,” said Randy A. Burba, who is also chief of public safety at Chapman University.

Another possible explanation might lie in the explosion that killed the gunman and damaged some of the college’s servers.

The college’s president, Mr. Adames, said he doesn’t want the incident to define the college.

“We will work diligently to get beyond this, we don’t deserve this, the students don’t deserve this,” he told reporters. “This will make us stronger.”

Katherine Mangan writes about community colleges, completion efforts, and job training, as well as other topics in daily news. Follow her on Twitter @KatherineMangan, or email her at katherine.mangan@chronicle.com.